Spirit of the Century

The deadly Doctor Methuselah seeks to unravel time itself with his solution to the Eternity Equation... Gorilla Khan stalks darkest Africa from conquered Atlantis... Mad scientists, strange sorcerors, and power-hungry dictators all seek to undo the fate of humanity. It's the final century of the second millennium – and you are our last hope!

Spirit of the Century is a complete, stand-alone pulp role-playing game based on the award-winning Fate system (Indie RPG Awards include: Best Free Game of 2003, Best Support, and Andy's Choice). Spirit features a heavily revised, revisited, and reimagined vision of Fate. Character creation can be done as quickly as a few minutes, or expand to take up an evening; adventure design is a snap with three methods for creating relevant, flavorful, player-focused stories at a moment's notice. Spirit's mission is to deliver an evening of fun, a "pick-up" game that requires little preparation, but provides hours of entertainment.

All you will need to play are some friends, some dice, and this book.

What People Are Saying

"Spirit of the Century is by a wide margin the best pulp game I've yet read, and yes, I do include the one I co-developed in that. Spirit builds with flair and intelligence on its predecessors, including Adventure, transmuting good intentions into brilliantly smooth execution. It is a beautiful little volume, well-written, entertainingly illustrated, and full of the fun. If you like to play pulp adventure roleplaying, then you want to check this out. Trust me on this: I repeatedly had the thought, 'I wish I'd done it that way', 'I wish I'd had that idea', and so on. It's great stuff."

A Pyramid Pick!"Above all, after reading Spirit of the Century, I want to run and play the game, its mechanical simplicity and the generous advice only making the prospect easier and almost intuitive. Spirit of the Century exuberantly exemplifies the pulp genre, and is not only the best Pulp RPG of 2006 and best Pulp RPG in a long time, but one of the best RPGs of 2006."

"I am reading Spirit right now, and my jaw has not left the floor. There are eleven good ideas on every page, and it is *all* laser-focused on actual play. That's why it's so long. Every single thing is immediately tied into real play, and how to make game play better. It's a killer, killer book. I stole liberally from Fate when I wrote Agon (mostly by way of TSOY), but now I'm wishing I had read SotC before the stealing began. So much goodness! Damn."

"For me, this is the best RPG of its type on the market. I have not been so excited about an RPG in some time. SotC is both a narrowly focused RPG and an excellent toolkit for a variety of other games. ... I feel like the GM advice showcases the very best advice the RPG community has learned over the last five years, making this a product that embraces fun at every stage while casting off some of the older notions about how roleplaying games are meant to be structured. I have never read an RPG where the advice on running the game was as consistently good as this advice is."

"Out of all the mainstream or indie books I've ever owned, no other company or designer has ever, EVER put as much time, thought and energy into making such a helpful section. The advice is universal (save for the one section on specific pulp games), it is solid, it is a MACHINE for producing GOOD GMs. I seriously want all the other players at my table (especially the Other GM of my weekly gaming group) to buy this game so that they can see this adivce as well. Not even in those mid-late 90's 'Mostly GM Advice' supplements (Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads, La Comme Il Faut, etc) have they even come close to scratching the surface of what Spirit of the Century covers in some 60 pages. This is a book that every GM should have on their shelf, and a book that has raised the standards. 'Oh, you didn't understand how to run this game? Well, you didn't try hard enough/You just don't get it': This sentence will never be able to be levelled again, as it's clear that it IS the designers' job to make the reader into a better GM/player, and it's also clear that there are real tools and explanations that can be leveraged to do so."

"We were finally able to get together to play our first full game of Spirit last night and it TOTALLY ROCKED! It was the most fun I've ever seen playing an RPG. The players really got into being able to personally mess with the story, and combat is the most colorful I've seen. This is a fantastic new direction for FATE!"

Essentially Fate 3.0. Prepare for awesome rip-roaring adventures full of derring-do! Very simple system that allows pick-up games in a few hours or longer campaigns. I am currently running a campaign using the system and it is some of the best, sillies [...]

Evil Hat has done an amazing job with the FATE system. My group and I have greatly enjoyed the Spirit of the Century It is a great blend of science, magic, and technology that allows for fantastic adventures. By no means is this a one shot deal either, [...]

Evil hat makes some quality product. Best part of any Evil Hat book is that it's an easy read - no walls of stat blocks or overly confusing jargon, and Spirit of the Century is no exception. On top of that, DriveThru is pretty much the best way to acquire [...]

This has to be Pulp gaming at it's finest. The mystery and intrigue and gung-ho fights that this oft glossed over genre, shines through in this unique approach to the FATE 3 system. The authors put a lot of thought (and most likely reading) into getting [...]

Awesome use of the ruleset! I am quite enamored of the setting and the assumptions about the larger than life aspects of the characters. I love a big freewheeling game and this is easily one of the best for that style of pley. [...]

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